Wesleyan University is generally considered a haven for individual expression, rhetoric, and discussion, and as a rule student voices do not want for hearing. However, once in awhile a method or arena arises that gives students a specific and new way to share their stories and beliefs with the world, or at least with the campus.
This time, the new opportunity for storytelling is in the form of The Handprint, a biannual creative nonfiction publication set to come out with its flagship issue in the first week of December. In the past several weeks the campus has been papered with fliers promoting the student-founded, produced, and edited magazine that encourage would-be writers to “tell us a story we’ve never heard before, in a way they’ve never said it before.”
“The Handprint will contain strictly creative nonfiction, students’ lived experiences expressed in a descriptive, evocative and clever way” said Rebecca Appel ’05, Editor-in Chief.
Appel founded the magazine and has been instrumental in getting it off the ground and through the WSA recognition process.
No publication is a one-person production: Appel has assembled an arsenal of formidable writers to help her get The Handprint started.
“I’m working with a wonderful editorial board: Amanda Thieroff ’06, Patrick Baron ’06, Doro Globus ’05, and Libby Gills ’06,” she said. “Anne Green [adjunct professor of English] also agreed to serve as adviser for the journal, which has been very helpful.”
Appel explained that The Handprint was born from dissatisfaction with the lack of opportunities for nonfiction writers at Wesleyan.
“I’d always been bothered that there was no extra-curricular space for student nonfiction on campus,” Appel said. “I love reading and writing non-fiction, and began to feel blocked out of the lit mags on campus, which are all heavily weighted towards fiction… Also, it seemed like a big mistake to me that there was no space for getting Wes students’ stories out there. People I’ve met here have had such wonderful and unique experiences, and I know I really want to hear about them.”
Gills, the magazine’s content editor, also commented on The Handprint’s focus on nonfiction.
“This magazine was formed to provide a space for creative nonfiction,” Gills said. “We felt that we needed a magazine for this kind of writing, and it is clear, from the great response we’ve gotten so far, that many people feel the same way.”
Thieroff was quick to qualify creative non-fiction as an amorphous field without rigid borders.
“Isn’t there a little nonfiction in everything fictional?” she said. “I want to encourage everyone to submit, even if they aren’t sure what exactly creative nonfiction is; it’s anything you want it to be, something we’ll write into existence and develop as we go along.”
Appel commented on the effort to get submissions for the first issue.
“[The editorial board is looking] for creative nonfiction written in essay or memoir style, but [is] open to all kinds of submissions from plays to poetry,” Appel said.
Unpublished? Inexperienced? Not to worry.
“Anyone who is currently a Wesleyan student can submit up to three pieces, but we’re expecting to narrow the final product down to about ten submissions…We’re judging solely on the quality of the submission,” Appel said.
The deadline for submissions to The Handprint is November 8.
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